Content About: Nanoscience

Specifically, the Raschke group developed a method to observe dark excitons in a 2D (i.e., a single layer of atoms) semiconductor at room temperature. This observation is an exciting development in the story of dark exciton applications, which includes quantum information processing and fundamental studies of complex...

Quantum computers require systems that can encode, manipulate, and transmit quantum bits, or qubits. A creative way to accomplish all this was recently demonstrated by Adam Reed and his colleagues in the Lehnert group. The researchers converted propagating qubits (encoded as superpositions1 of zero and one microwave photons) into the motion of a tiny aluminum drum. The successful conversion is...

The Kapteyn-Murnane group has come up with a novel way to use fast bursts of extreme ultraviolet light to capture how strongly electrons interact with each other in materials. This research is important for figuring out how quickly materials can change their state from insulating to conducting, or from magnetic to nonmagnetic. In the future such fast switching may lead to faster and more...

Dennis Gardner and his coworkers in the Kapteyn-Murnane group accomplished two major breakthroughs in imaging tiny structures much too small to be seen with visible light microscopes: (1) for the first time in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) or soft X-ray region, they achieved a resolution smaller than the wavelength of the light; and (2) for the first time, they obtained high resolution...

Christina Porter has won the 2017 Karel Urbanek Best Student Paper Award. The award consists of a wall plaque, honorarium, and trophy. The award was presented on Thursday March 2, 2017, at this year's Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography conference at the SPIE Advanced LIthography in San Jose, California. The award is sponsored by KLA-Tencor.

Markus Raschke has been given a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation. The award is given in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. Award winners are invited to conduct reseach projects of their choice in cooperation with colleagues in Germany, with the goal of promoting international scientific cooperation. The Humboldt Foundation annually grants about...

Jennifer Ellis won an Optical Society of America (OSA) award in recognition of her excellent oral contribution at the International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena, held July 17–22 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellis, who is a graduate student with the Kapteyn/Murnane group, spoke about her work on Femtosecond Dynamics of Solvated Electrons in Nanodroplets Probed with Extreme Ultraviolet Beams....

The Raschke group has created an ultrafast optical nanoscope based on a unique way of “nano” focusing the light to image the behavior of electrons on a thin gold film. The nanoscope is 1,000 times more powerful than conventional optical microscopes. It allows the researchers to investigate matter on its natural time and length scales, which are measured in femtoseconds and nanometers,...

Bob Peterson and his colleagues in the Lehnert-Regal lab recently set out to try something that had never been done before: use laser cooling to systematically reduce the temperature of a tiny drum made of silicon nitride as low as allowed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Although laser cooling has become commonplace for atoms, researchers have only recently used lasers to cool tiny silicon...

The Kapteyn/Murnane group has measured how long it takes an electron born into an excited state inside a piece of nickel to escape from its birthplace. The electron’s escape is related to the structure of the metal. The escape is the fastest material process that has been measured before in the laboratory––on a time scale of a few hundred attoseconds, or 10-18 s. This groundbreaking experiment...

In the future, quantum microwave networks may handle quantum information transfer via optical fibers or microwave cables. The evolution of a quantum microwave network will rely on innovative microwave circuits currently being developed and characterized by the Lehnert group. Applications for this innovative technology could one day include quantum computing, converters that transform microwave...

The Perkins Group has demonstrated a 50-to-100 times improvement in the time resolution for studying the details of protein folding and unfolding on a commercial Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). This enhanced real time probing of protein folding is revealing details in these complex processes never seen before. This substantial enhancement in AFM force spectroscopy may one day have powerful...

JILA graduate students Stephen Okoniewski (Perkins group), Jake Pettine (Nesbitt group), and Lindsay Sonderhouse (Ye group) have won coveted 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, NSF announced March 31. The five-year Graduate Research Fellowships provide three years of support, with a per-year stipend of $34,000 and cost of education allowance of $12,000. Tuition and...

One of the great challenges in the semiconductor and electronics industries is that as nanoscale features get smaller and processes get faster, enormous amounts of heat need to be quickly carried away from the nanostructures. The Kapteyn/Murnane group has made the counter-intuitive discovery that it is easier to cool these nanostructures when they are arranged closely together. The researchers...

Kathleen Hoogeboom-Pot has won the Karel Urbanek Best Student Paper Award for 2015 at the SPIE conference on Metrology, Process Control, and Inspection for Microlithography. Her paper was entitled "Mechanical and thermal properties of nanomaterials at sub-50 nm dimensions characterized using coherent EUV beams." Hoogeboom-Pot received the award on February 26, 2015.

The Raschke group recently came up with a clever way to detect folds and grain boundaries in graphene. a sheet made of a single layer of carbon atoms.Such defects stop the flow of electrons in graphene and are a big headache for engineers working on touch screens and other electronic devices made of this material.

The group has invented a nano sonar-like system that uses infrared (IR)...

The Markus Raschke group has come up with an innovative way that may one day allow it to peer inside superconductors, new materials for solar cells, or even a single cell and identify the inner workings of these complex systems. The new method is able to determine where the different chemical constituents are located and how their spatial distribution determines their function.

Fellow Tom Perkins’ group is significantly closer to realizing its long-standing dream of using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to study how membrane proteins fold and unfold. Historically, scientists have used AFM to measure the mechanical forces needed to unfold individual proteins and the resulting increase in their lengths. However, the limitations of AFM itself have prevented researchers...

When Andy Almand-Hunter and his colleagues in the Cundiff group shined a laser on a sample of gallium arsenide (GaAs), the last thing they were expecting to create was a fog of liquid-like quantum droplets, which the group named "dropletons." Dropletons are a new, stable form of matter much like an ordinary liquid—with one key difference.

The groups of Fellow Adjoint Markus Raschke and Fellow Tom Perkins joined forces recently to shine light onto a bacterial membrane protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR). They used a new infrared (IR) light imaging system with a spatial resolution and chemical sensitivity of just a few bR molecules. In their experiment, the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) acted like an antenna for the...

Real-world quantum mechanics may not always work exactly like the simple picture presented in textbooks, according to observations made by research associate Gaël Nardin and his colleagues in the Cundiff group.

In a recent experiment (described online in Physical Review Letters this week), the group discovered evidence of coupling between particles in semiconductor quantum wells that...

Steve Cundiff was named an IEEE Fellow on January 1, 2014. In electing him as a Fellow, the Board of Directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. cited him "for contributions to self-referenced optical frequency combs and ultrafast nonlinear solid-state spectroscopy."

"I am delighted to share the good news with you and to congratulate you on having this...

When research associate Wei Xiong and graduate student Dan Hickstein studied quantum dots by shining laser light on them in the gas phase, they got some surprising results. The tiny chunks of material responded differently to series of two laser pulses — depending on their size. Scientists already knew that most of their quantum dots would end up with at least part of an electron wandering...

The Nesbitt group has figured out the central role of “plasmon resonances” in light-induced emission of electrons from gold or silver nanoparticles. Plasmons are rapid-fire electron oscillations of freely moving (conduction) electrons in metals. They are caused by light of just the “right frequency.”

In metal nanoparticles, the right frequency exquisitely depends on the shape of the...

We can get valuable information about a material by studying how it responds to light. But up to now, researchers have been forced to ignore how some of light’s stranger quantum behavior, such as being in a superposition of one or more intensity states, affects these measurements. New research from the Cundiff group (with newly minted PhD Ryan Smith and graduate student Andy Hunter...

The Lehnert group and collaborators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently made what was essentially a CT scan of the quantum state of a microwave field. The researchers made 100 measurements at different angles of this quantum state as it was wiggling around. Because they only viewed the quantum state from one angle at a time, they were able to circumvent...

The semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) is used to make tiny structures in electronic devices such as integrated circuits, light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, and solar cells that directly convert light into electrical energy. Because of GaAs’s importance to modern electronics, the Cundiff group seeks to understand the fundamental physics of its light-matter interactions on atomic and...

In microscopic studies of single biological molecules or nanoparticles, it’s useful to be able to precisely control the temperature around the sample. Until now, heating has required electric currents that warm up microscope stages, slides, and optics in addition to the specimen under study. Such methods are slow and hard to control, not to mention capable of accidentally altering the...

The cold-molecule collaboration has developed a method for directly imaging ultracold ground-state KRb molecules. Their old method required the transfer of ultracold KRb molecules into a Feshbach state, which is sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. Thus researchers had to turn off the electric field and keep the magnetic field at a fixed value during the imaging process. However, the...

Heat does not always flow as rapidly near nanostructures as it typically does in solids. Instead, it can go ballistic! Ballistic heat transfer occurs near a tiny device if its size is smaller than the distance a phonon, or lattice vibration, travels before colliding with another phonon. When this happens, heat flow is reduced, and a nanoscale hot spot is created. Ballistic heat transfer away...

Monodromy literally means "once around." The term is applied in mathematics to systems that run around a singularity. In these systems, a parameter that describes the state of the system changes when the system loops around the singularity. Since monodromy’s discovery in 1980, mathematicians have predicted that many physical systems have it, including pendulums and tops as...

Quantum dots are tiny structures made of semiconductor materials. With diameters of 1–5 nm, they are small enough to constrain their constituents in all three dimensions. This constraint means that when a photon of light knocks an electron into the conduction band and creates an electron/hole pair, the pair can’t get out of the dot. In terms of quantum mechanics, this confinement...

The most important step for a microscope wanting to marry another microscope is finding the right partner. A professional matchmaker, such as the Perkins lab, might be just the ticket. The group recently presided over the nuptials of atomic force microscopy and optical-trapping microscopy. Research associate Gavin King, graduate students Ashley Carter and Allison Churnside, CU freshman...

Imagine being able to study how molecules form on the quantum level. It turns out that researchers have already figured out some nifty techniques involving lasers and jets of reactive atoms for doing just that in a gaseous environment. Now graduate student Alex Zolot, former Visiting Fellow Paul Dagdikian of Johns Hopkins University, and Fellow David Nesbitt have taken this kind of study...

Last year the Ye group conducted an actual laboratory astrophysics experiment. Graduate students Brian Sawyer, Ben Stuhl, and Mark Yeo, research associate Dajun Wang, and Fellow Jun Ye fired cold hydroxyl (OH) radicals into a linear decelerator equipped with an array of highly charged electrodes and slowed the OH molecules to a standstill. These molecules were then loaded into a permanent...

In the summer of 2008, Fellow Jun Ye spent a couple of months at CalTech, where he ran into another visiting professor, former JILA Fellow Peter Zoller. Zoller left JILA in 1994 to become Professor of Physics at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Besides riding bikes together in the mountains, the two men engaged in happy and fruitful discussions about Ye’s work developing a strontium- (Sr...

An oxygen molecule (O2) doesn't fall apart so easily — even when an X-ray knocks out one of its electrons and superexcites the molecule during a process called photoionization. In this process, the X-ray first removes an electron from deep inside the molecule, leaving a hole in O2+. Then, an outer electron can fall into the hole, and a second outer electron gets ejected, carrying away any...

Xibin Zhou and his colleagues in the Kapteyn/Murnane group have come up with a clever new way to study the structure of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other molecules. The researchers use two innovative tools: (1) coherent electrons knocked out of the CO2 molecules by a laser and (2) the X-rays produced by these electrons when they recollide with the same molecules. The coherent electrons and X-rays...

Fellow Konrad Lehnert needed a virtually noiseless amplifier to help with his experiments on nanoscale structures, so he invented one. Working with graduate student Manuel Castellanos-Beltran and NIST scientists Kent Irwin, Gene Hilton, and Leila Vale, he conceived a tunable device that operates in frequencies ranging from 4 to 8 GHz. This device has the lowest system noise ever measured for...

The Jin and Ye groups recently crafted an entirely new form of matter — tens of thousands of ultracold polar molecules in their lowest energy state. The ground-state molecules are too cold to exist naturally anywhere in the Universe. But, like the Bose-Einstein condensates discovered in the mid-1990s, they promise to open the door to unprecedented explorations of the quantum world, including...

The Jin group recently came up with the first strong experimental link between superfluidity in ultracold Fermi gases and superconductivity in metals. What’s more, this feat was accomplished with photoemission spectroscopy, a tried-and-true technique that has been used for more than 100 years to study solids. This technique has been instrumental in revealing the properties of superconductors....

What happens to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) when its atoms interact strongly? One possibility for large attractive interactions is that the condensate shrinks and then explodes, as the Cornell and Wieman groups discovered in 2001. Another possibility for large repulsive interactions is behavior analogous to that of superfluid liquid helium. If superfluid liquid heliumlike dynamics could...

Nanoartisans Cindy Regal, John Teufel, and Konrad Lehnert have come up with a clever new way to observe ordinary (very small) things behaving quantum mechanically. They’ve tucked a nanomechanical beam (which is actually a really thin aluminum wire) inside a tiny resonant microwave cavity made of lightweight superconducting aluminum. This design ensures that very small forces will cause...

Fellow Jun Ye’s group is methodically working its way toward the creation of an X-Ray frequency comb. Recently, senior research associate Thomas Schibli, graduate student Dylan Yost, Fellow Jun Ye, and colleagues from IMRA America, Inc. developed a high-performance, ultrastable fiber laser optical frequency comb. At the same time, Yost developed a clever method for getting coherent short-...

For many years, chemists have explored the differences between liquids and solids. One difference is that liquid surfaces tend to be softer than solid surfaces (from the perspective of molecules crashing onto them). Another difference is that the surface of at least one oily liquid (perfluorinated polyether, or PFPE) actually gets stickier as it gets hotter, according to a new study by...

By late 2006, Fellow Jun Ye’s clock team had raised the accuracy of its strontium (Sr)-lattice atomic clock to be just shy of that of the nation’s primary time and frequency standard, the NIST-F1 cesium (Cs) fountain clock. Graduate students Marty Boyd and Andrew Ludlow led the effort to improve the clock’s accuracy. But then, the clock team had to spend another year proving that its imporved...

With every breath you take, you breathe out carbon dioxide and roughly 1000 other different molecules. Some of these can signal the early onset of such diseases as asthma, cystic fibrosis, or cancer. Thanks to graduate student Mike Thorpe and his colleagues in Fellow Jun Ye’s group, medical practitioners may one day be able to identify these disease markers with a low-cost, noninvasive breath...

The Kapteyn/Murnane group recently proved that you don’t need an accelerator facility to make the X-Rays for an X-Ray microscope. In fact, you can build the whole device on an optical bench — if you use a femtosecond laser to generate coherent X-Rays. The group makes coherent X-Rays by shining the laser into a glass tube filled with argon gas. The argon atoms absorb many low-energy laser...

The Perkins group is helping to develop DNA as a force standard for the nano world. Polymers of DNA act like springs, and DNA's elasticity may one day provide a force standard from 0.1–10 piconewtons (pN). One pN is the force exerted when 1 mW of light reflects off a mirror or the approximate weight of one hundred E. coli cells. DNA is an excellent candidate for a force standard...

In the quantum world inside Fellow Eric Cornell’s lab, communication occurs across a two-dimensional lattice array of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) when atoms tunnel out of superatoms (made from about 7000 garden-variety rubidium (Rb) atoms) into neighboring BECs. This communication keeps the array coherent, i.e., the phases of all condensates remain locked to each other. But something...

Small changes in the quantum fluctuations of free space are responsible for a variety of curious phenomena: a gecko’s ability to walk across ceilings, the evaporation of black holes via Hawking radiation, and the fact that warmer surfaces can be stickier than cold ones in micro- and nanoscale electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS). The tendency of tiny parts to stick together is a...

A key challenge in developing new nanotechnologies is figuring out a fast, low-noise technique for translating small mechanical motions into reasonable electronic signals. Solving this problem will one day make it possible to build electronic signal processing devices that are much more compact than their purely electronic counterparts. Much sooner, it will enable the design of advanced...

If you want to "see" physical objects whose dimensions are measured in nanometers and simultaneously probe the electronic structure of the atoms, molecules, and surfaces populating this nanoworld, you just might have to invent a new microscope. In fact, that's exactly what Fellow David Nesbitt's group recently accomplished.

Life can be challenging on the biophysics research frontier. Consider gold nanoparticles as a research tool, for example. Gold is ductile and malleable as well as being a good conductor of heat and electricity. Its unique chemistry allows proteins and DNA to be easily attached to these nanoparticles. Physicists have been investigating gold nanoparticles in optical-trapping experiments...

The fine structure constant is getting a lot of attention these days. Known as α, it is the "coupling constant," or measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs how electrons, muons, and light interact. What's intriguing is that new models for the basic structure of matter predict that α may have changed over vast spans of cosmic time, with the...

JILA physicists are collaborating to explore the link between superconductivity and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of fermions at ultracold temperatures. Fermions have an odd number of total protons, neutrons, and electrons, giving them a half integer spin, which is either up or down. At ultracold temperatures, this means fermions can't just occupy the same energy level (like bosons, which...

Chemical physicists investigate the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules on the quantum level. Such research is particularly challenging when the molecule under investigation appears in small amounts and is rapidly transformed into something else, e.g., during combustion, chemical synthesis, or atmospheric chemical reactions. Happily, Research Associate Feng Dong, Fellow David Nesbitt...

"Watch" atoms collide! Thrill to the twists and turns of potassium atom wave functions as the atoms come closer and closer to impact! "See" the atoms deform, then recover as they smash together and fly apart inside a dense atomic vapor! It's all in a day's work for Graduate Student Virginia (Gina) Lorenz and Fellow Steve Cundiff.

Brad Perkins and his thesis advisor Fellow David Nesbitt recently decided to explore what happens when fast, cold carbon dioxide molecules collide with the surface of an oily liquid (perfluoropolyether). Of course, you can only do these sorts of things in a vacuum chamber, where there are virtually no other gas molecules in the air to get in the way! The vacuum chamber itself creates an...

Graduate students Dave Harber and John Obrecht, postdoc Jeff McGuirk, and Fellow Eric Cornell recently devised a clever way to use a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) inside a magnetic trap to probe the quantum behavior of free space. To do this, the researchers first created a BEC inside a magnetic trap, whose shape (where the condensate forms) resembles a cereal bowl. Then as shown in the...

RNA molecules can perform amazing biological feats, including storing, transporting, and reading genetic blueprints as well as catalyzing chemical reactions inside living cells. To manage the latter feat, RNA molecules must rapidly fold into an exact three-dimensional (3D) shape. Understanding how RNA accomplishes this is a major scientific challenge. Former JILA postdoc Jose Hodak,...

Lora Nugent-Glandorf and Tom Perkins have come up with an optical trap motion detector that can "see" protein motors moving one base at a time along a DNA helix. For some time scientists have been able to make optical traps that can track the movement of attached beads, but the method had a resolution of 1-2 nanometers, which was not sensitive enough to resolve .338 nm DNA base...

Markus Greiner, Cindy Regal, Jayson Stewart, and Debbie Jin have found the first-ever visual evidence of correlated ultracold atoms in the noise patterns present in images of an ultracold cloud of potassium.

The researchers split ultracold molecules into entangled pairs of atoms flying apart in opposite directions, as shown to the right. Then they used a laser beam to create a...

Pete Roos, Tara Fortier, Xiaoqin Li, Ryan Smith, Jessica Pipis, and Steve Cundiff are using a phase-controlled mode-locked laser to control quantum processes in semiconductors. Semiconductors are capable of producing electrical currents from light (and vice-versa) and are the basis for a wide variety of optoelectronic devices, including photodiodes, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells....

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